(Natural News) What do you have to do to earn accolades as a journalist and win awards? The less disillusioned among us might say you need to be a good and engaging writer who secures authentic sources and shares exhaustively confirmed information with readers. The rest of us know better: All you really have to do is push a liberal agenda with stories that sound believable without letting pesky facts get in the way.

In fact, if the truth doesn’t support the agenda you’re supposed to push, you could always make up a story. That’s what one writer for one of Germany’s most respected publications, Der Spiegel, did – and he won a slew of journalism awards for his efforts before he got caught.

Decorated with honors like the European Press Prize, the Forbes List of 30 Under 30 European Media award, and CNN’s Journalist of the Year, 33-year-old reporter Claas Relotius wrote about topics like vigilante groups on the U.S. border with Mexico, a rural American town that is in favor of President Trump, and a Yemeni prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.

One of his more celebrated stories was about Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Full of stereotypes about gun-loving Trump followers, outraged local residents set the story straight in an article of their own posted on Medium. They said that “in 7,300 words, he really only got our town’s population and average annual temperature correct.” He says, for example, that city administrator Andrew Bremseth carries a Beretta 9mm to work – but Bremseth says he doesn’t own a Beretta and would never wear a gun to work. He also wrote Bremseth had never been with a woman or visited the ocean, something he says is untrue and can easily be dispelled by looking at pictures of him with his long-term girlfriend in front of the ocean posted to his Facebook account.

He also wrote that local high school students skipped a visit to the Statue of Liberty in favor of going to Trump Tower on a school trip to New York City that locals say never took place to begin with. But it’s easy to see why his editors must have been so keen to publish the piece, which makes the town look like a place full of uneducated hicks who know nothing about the world and blindly follow Trump – an idea that media outlets around the world seem all too happy to promote.